What Companies Want
Let's learn the expectations associated with different career levels.
Titles based on experience level#
There is some consensus on what to call each experience level. If we had to condense each:
- Junior: Learning best practices, executing under guidance. “Intermediate” developers also fall into this bucket by virtue of being not-senior
- Senior: Independent execution, mentorship of Juniors
- Staff: Team lead, defining best practices, architecture, and improving productivity
- Principal: Industry accomplishments, owning technology/roadmap;
- Large companies also have “Architect”, “Distinguished” and “Fellow” titles to reflect various degrees of super-seniority.
Dreyfus model of directed skill acquisition#
This loosely maps to the five-stage Dreyfus model of Directed Skill Acquisition:
- Novice: Rigid adherence to rules or plans, little situational perception, and no (or limited) discretionary judgment
- Advanced Beginner: Guidelines for action based on attributes and aspects, which are all equal and separate, limited situational perception
- Competent: Conscious, deliberate planning, standardized and routine procedures.
- Proficient: Sees situations holistically, perceives deviations from normal patterns, and uses maxims for guidance, whose meanings are contextual
- Expert: No longer relies on rules, guidelines, or maxims. Intuitive grasp of situations, analytic approach used only in novel situations.
All companies track progression on multiple dimensions. Here is an amalgam of what the extreme ends of the experience spectrum look like so you can place yourself and find a direction to improve.
Junior#
Technical competence
- Learning best practices and the codebase
- Can work on scoped problems with some guidance
- Write clean code and tests
- Participate in code reviews and technical design
Execution
- Commits to and completes tasks within the expected time frame, holding themselves accountable
- Building estimation skills
- Asks for help to get unblocked when necessary
- Learning tools and resources
Communication
- Learning to work collaboratively on a team and communicate in meetings
- Effectively communicates work status to teammates and managers
- Proactively asks questions and reaches out for help when stuck
- Voices concerns or need for clarification to their manager
- Accepts feedback graciously and learns from experience
Influence
- Has project/team-level impact
- Pairs to gain knowledge
- Represents their team well to others in the company
- May participate in hiring
Senior#
Technical competence
- Technical leadership for their domain
- Independently designing solutions for scale and reliability
- Primary expert across multiple areas
- Focused on highest impact, most critical, future-facing decisions and guidance, advancing company technically and affecting business success
Execution
- Able to plan and execute large, complex projects with interdependencies across teams and systems, spanning months to years
- Looked to as a model for balancing product and engineering concerns.
- Trusted with any critical project or initiative
- Owns capacity and growth of technical systems across multiple domains, defining key metrics
- Creates a compelling technical vision with company-level impact, anticipating future needs.
Communication
- Comfortably communicates complex issues to diverse audiences inside and outside the company
- Proactively identifies and remedies communication gaps and issues.
Influence
- Routinely has org to industry-level impact
- May work with exec team on high-level technical guidance
- Has an obvious impact on the company’s technical trajectory
- Influences company goals and strategy, identifying new business growth opportunities
- Expert on company’s platform, architecture, and workflow
- Builds leaders
- Educates across the org
- Defines and models engineering brand, patterns, and practices
- External ambassador, drawing engineers to the company
- A recognized leader within the company and possibly in the broader technical community
- Leads complex initiatives with long-term, strategic value
Other dimensions#
Many ladders evaluate employees based on how they demonstrate company values as well, covering themes from teamwork, disagree and commit, growth mindset, the ability to give and act upon feedback, and degree of trust. If you are in a position to influence your company ladder, consider advocating for including the sponsorship of underrepresented minorities directly into your company ladder. The best way to show you really care about making a dent in tech’s diversity problem is to make it a part of your formal evaluation and promotion criteria.
When and Why to Ladder
Individual Company Ladders